Fashion Chit-Chat

Super Star

since many of us are interested in the fashion industry, I thought we could have a thread where we talk about fashion news that are not weight-related. Who got which campaign? Is Meisel back with Vogue Italia for good? Is Anna Ewers unstoppable? You get what I mean.

I'll just start and hope you gurls are interested in jumping in!

Julia Stegner got Chloé (alongside Anja)! How cool is that? I hope she'll be having a major post-baby high fashion comeback. She has been doing commercial stuff for a while again now, but nothing really interesting. Excited!

She's been modeling for quite a while, but had to shave her hair after an accident. She's not my type personally, but I think her edge is very intriguing. She just rocked the menswear shows in New York and I smell big things for her come September.

Banned

The key to success as a model, is not to focus on “having” a career, but “building” a career. It is the key to building something with longevity.
As we launch a new face, in some ways, it’s the easy part. You find, groom, and develop. When it’s time, you launch into the fashion stratosphere & you see what happens. As time goes on, 2 things determine a lot.
One, they must remain coach able. 20 years into this, we have a pretty keen sense, along with the teams we work with, on the importance of evolving, growing, and in some cases reinventing, to keep the fashion world engaged and inspired.

Two, they must remain adaptable. The one constant in this business is change. The fashion world and its moving parts, move at the sound of light. Strong management has to stay engaged with the response from the powers that be, constantly readjusting and figuring out what the next best move is. They have to jump for the parachute to open. The wind may shift,the direction may change, but that’s the exciting part.
The building of a career over time is sweet. We love when a model reaches new heights and you can look back at the uncertainty and “not knowing” along the way, and the value of TRUSTING. It makes the victory so much more sweet, and it builds a beautiful & immeasurable bond.

Building a career involves risk. There are times of uncertainty. When a model focuses on having a career and wants to have the reigns in their own hands, rarely will they reach the heights they could have, had they been willing to let the reigns go & give them to their trusted team.

The most successful people I know built a career over time. They went along with the ebb & flow, & kept moving forward, one open door at a time. They didn’t need to bum rush every door at once, or while they were at door one, obsessed with needing to know what was behind door number two, three, & four. They remained present entering door one. “Having” is a state of ownership, “building” is a one day at a time journey, that takes you to heights you never could have achieved. It takes risk, uncertainty, & willingness to adapt & change. Building is a mindset, a way of life. It’s really is where the adventure lies.

What else does one expect when these "bespoke " fashion houses are bought and subsumed under corporate conglomerates like LVMH and Kering? I think Balenciaga is owned entirely by Kering. These companies by virtue of being publicly-traded are concerned with annual reports and generating yield (profit) for their investors. In my opinion, it is a disgusting shame to the Balenciaga legacy, as it is to the legacies of Christian Dior among others, but the reality is that these fashion houses have lost every sense of what made them "luxury" in the first place.

Rising Star

@xxAudreyxx I agree, I think the key part is this: 'everything he did not strive for'.

Where I'm a little two-sided on the point is that I'm unashamedly a Hedi Slimane fan; even though he has his very definitive 'aesthetic' (why did the internet have to spoil the term?), I do believe with Saint Laurent he restored the overlying concept of Yves' work which was - modernisation, progression etc.

Sure, it was all seen before by those of us who've lived in those clothes for a billion years, and the price tag for these not-so-luxe-garments (I believe on the forums there was even quite condemnation of the fabrics) are obscene, but it wasn't so prevalent on the runways.

I like the bleeding of the runways to the street, but I do agree that there's become an overarching 'Kering look' (or perhaps 'feel' is a better term) that I find really quite distasteful. It's the same in the art world at the moment, I could go into that but I'll just end up ranting.

They may as well open a Kering department store with the rate it's going.

..and don't get me started on the beauty lines of so-called 'luxury' brands, I'll need at least ten Žižek GIFs.

Grand Dame

I didn't want to make a thread for this catastrophe but has anybody been keeping up with D&G China show that was cancelled due to their extremely distasteful ad and racist messages from (maybe) Stefano Gabanna?

" It was a big show for me, a good opportunity, and I thought that amongst all their other bullshit, this was actually relatively minor. I said that I thought the videos were particularly tone deaf, especially considering the other controversies that brands have had in China recently."

"Dolce has also been smart at leveraging influencers and targeting millennial kids with multi-millionaire parents and offering them the chance to be in their shows (both to reward their substantial shopping, but also presumably on the tacit agreement that they will then siphon money back into the brand by continuing to spend money). The customer base is therefore more integrated at the highest level than perhaps in any other brand"

"Dolce had been instrumental in promoting the careers of some of these Chinese KOLs, but they were the first to leave the show. In a contest between loyalty to a brand of Italian racists and the risk of offending their Chinese fans and risking the ire of the Chinese government, there was no choice. Some of them had already received their fee in advance for being there, and for the ones who had paid their way into the show through shopping, it was a drop in the ocean of their shoreless wealth; nothing more than an archipelago in their overall closets. There’d be other events for other brands.

It’s a few hours since the KOLs have left and I have by now also seen most of the Chinese models leave, watching as a number of them go in tears. Sitting with the foreign models in the catering room and listening to them go back and forth over whether or not they themselves should walk in the show – the overwhelming sentiment is that they believe they should – I have already decided that I won’t. I stay to watch the thing crumble from the inside, though I take no pleasure in it. Part of me is, on some level, gutted. This would have been my biggest show."

Rising Star

I didn't want to make a thread for this catastrophe but has anybody been keeping up with D&G China show that was cancelled due to their extremely distasteful ad and racist messages from (maybe) Stefano Gabanna?

" It was a big show for me, a good opportunity, and I thought that amongst all their other bullshit, this was actually relatively minor. I said that I thought the videos were particularly tone deaf, especially considering the other controversies that brands have had in China recently."

"Dolce has also been smart at leveraging influencers and targeting millennial kids with multi-millionaire parents and offering them the chance to be in their shows (both to reward their substantial shopping, but also presumably on the tacit agreement that they will then siphon money back into the brand by continuing to spend money). The customer base is therefore more integrated at the highest level than perhaps in any other brand"

"Dolce had been instrumental in promoting the careers of some of these Chinese KOLs, but they were the first to leave the show. In a contest between loyalty to a brand of Italian racists and the risk of offending their Chinese fans and risking the ire of the Chinese government, there was no choice. Some of them had already received their fee in advance for being there, and for the ones who had paid their way into the show through shopping, it was a drop in the ocean of their shoreless wealth; nothing more than an archipelago in their overall closets. There’d be other events for other brands.

It’s a few hours since the KOLs have left and I have by now also seen most of the Chinese models leave, watching as a number of them go in tears. Sitting with the foreign models in the catering room and listening to them go back and forth over whether or not they themselves should walk in the show – the overwhelming sentiment is that they believe they should – I have already decided that I won’t. I stay to watch the thing crumble from the inside, though I take no pleasure in it. Part of me is, on some level, gutted. This would have been my biggest show."

I hadn't been following the entire thing super closely thanks to being busy for Thanksgiving, but now that I'm finally watching the ads/reading the screenshots I'm completely baffled. Why would someone say something so obviously racist/offensive, then claim that they got hacked? Of course, we can't be sure that those screenshots are real and whatnot, but the ads themselves also seemed sort of problematic. I don't know if I was reading too much into it, but I definitely got a weirdly sexual vibe from the "omg it's too big!" cannoli thing (though I do think the subtitles are a bit misleading-the word that the subtitles translated as "penetrate" basically means "stick it in". You'd use that word when you're talking about plugging in a flash drive or something).

IDK, I think what got to me the most was the patronizing/almost condescending tone that the narrator uses. It reminded me of educational videos meant for little kids. Also, I really don't understand what the ads were supposed to convey-did D&G seriously think that Chinese people had never encountered pizza, spaghetti, or cannoli before? Unless they were trying to cater to poor farmers living in rural China, the context of the ads seriously made no sense to me.

(And, contrary to what the ad claims, eating Italian spaghetti is not that much different from eating, say, ramen. Or hand-pulled noodles. Maybe I'm just uncultured, but...)

Anyway, I found the Dazed article really interesting. The model mentions the Chinese government's sensitivity to perceived slights and how VPNs are 100% necessary to connect to Instagram, and it sort of lent a surreal air to everything (I find it quite ironic that the government still calls itself socialist and whatnot, especially with the undeniably capitalist events such as the VSFS taking place in China, but that's a different discussion for another day). I also felt really bad for some of the models

Worker Bee

D&G hasn't followed the times and chooses to stay in their own bubble. Somebody made a reference to Trump on an other forum. They are old men, delusional in their ways and only choose to see the world their way. This ad would've been thought to be still funny 20 years ago. Perhaps even 10.

Rising Star

D&G hasn't followed the times and chooses to stay in their own bubble. Somebody made a reference to Trump on an other forum. They are old men, delusional in their ways and only choose to see the world their way. This ad would've been thought to be still funny 20 years ago. Perhaps even 10.

ACTUALLY... it's because they made poor business decisions and didn't properly consider vertical integration (which tbh they still don't) and it's become too expensive. I lived very VERY close to one of Hermes' crocodile farms for a while, and I can promise you there was nothing unethical about the way they are being treated. The little ones were kept in very close quarters, but so are most young farm animals. All the crocs had plenty of space to move about, and they typically don't move much at all (it's pretty fucking terrifying tbh).
I guess they'll start doing the YSL thing and embossing leather with a croc pattern, but it's not the same at all.
Good news for LVMH and Hermes tho!

Grand Dame

Raf Simons left Calvin Klein. The reasons still appear to unknown, yet I personally found his designs for the brand underwhelming if compared to his previous works.

DietPrada on ig and the general public were against Prada's monkey figures, so they won't be sold anymore. what do you think? is this excessive? Taken too personally? I did not think about the reference when I first saw them, they reminded me of Paul Frank. Yet I believe in the US racial issues are felt more strongly, and as America is part of the targeted market, the team should take that into account, too.

ultimately, Models.com elected as male and female models of the year Alton Mason and Adut, which I both appreciate for the personality they are able to show in every shoot/show. many says this 'inclusion' movement is a marketing strategy or whatever, yet I believe it is healthy for the industry. Alton used to have a high fashion twitter account back in 2015 where he was like 'imma make it big y'all watch'. well he did. I'm glad.

Grand Dame

Anyone getting a load of the Carissa Pinkston saga? @twistpinkston . Basically she made a series of transphobic posts and continued to do it until Monster dropped her and now she is lying about being trans as an excuse. Unreal.

Rising Star

Anyone getting a load of the Carissa Pinkston saga? @twistpinkston . Basically she made a series of transphobic posts and continued to do it until Monster dropped her and now she is lying about being trans as an excuse. Unreal.

OMG. I didnt know that side of the drama. I thought she was dropped for being trans and lying about being a biological female the whole time. Thats kind of how it looked from someone who didnt have all the details. Thank you for the details! I want there to be a thread for model drama like this. Thats so disgusting of her. Looks like her career is over!